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Google: ISPs Must Come Together to Fight Malware

Eric Davis, head of Google's Anti-Malvertising team, said that in order to prevent the curse of malicious Web botnets and advertisements from infected computer systems, a serious and more comprehensive level of cooperation is required among the industry's top notch professionals, as reported by threatpost.com on September 23, 2009.

Speaking at the Virus Bulletin conference in Geneva (Switzerland), Davis stated that in order to deal with the parasites which have conquered the Internet world, Internet service providers need to think beyond profits and collaborate on innovative initiatives, according a report published by zdnet.com on September 23, 2009.

Malicious ads that appear on legitimate websites along with being prominent in Google search results since some time now, have now become a grave issue. Not just Google and other search providers, but sites that are dependent on third parties and ad syndication networks for ad display are seriously getting affected from malicious ads.

In addition, domains that are often used by these scammers are hosted by alleged bullet-proof hosting providers, who ignore the activities being performed on their servers. Attackers, however, sometimes use authentic hosting services as well, and even though ISPs try to eradicate these malicious domains after detecting, scammers very quickly shift to another provider.

Purportedly, as of now, a large amount of malware ads are made with Flash. Extensive media involves some dangerous techniques, installing malware even if there's no action on user's part. It can very well influence renowned brands and apply complicated tricks to plant spiteful ads on high-traffic genuine sites.

In the meantime, security experts have advised all the ISPs to use Australian Internet Security Initiative (AISI) as an ideal to combat malware. Till the time, malicious software is removed from the system; the AISI group has made least customer security levels mandatory, and also segregates infected systems into "walled garden".

Finally, security experts have strongly recommended that ISPs must make it mandatory for computers connected to the Internet to be completely patched and have up-tp-date anti-malware solution in place.